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Contact management is crucial; a CRM can either remain effective or become overwhelming. Clarify and Clay
Social selling exists at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility — you also risk losing deals to teams that are more attuned to their relationships.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with a flexible, social-selling-friendly environment to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, allowing you to determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?
Most B2B deals don’t originate from cold emails or demo requests. They begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or even a silent profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team may operate in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships right before your eyes.
A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to convert those interactions into structured and actionable insights: who engaged, their origin, their interests, and their proximity to purchasing. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a “nice-to-have awareness,” it transforms into a measurable, repeatable action within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views and convert them into follow-ups
✔️ Differentiate which prospects are familiar with you through content versus outbound methods, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships not just among contacts but also across accounts, champions, and influencers
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activities, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is Clarify?
Clarify is an AI-driven CRM tailored for startups and lean sales teams, consolidating email, meetings, and deal details into a single, efficient interface. It seamlessly integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, automatically syncing email, calendar events, and meeting insights to enhance timelines and suggest follow-ups via AI. Users can compose and dispatch emails directly from Clarify, ensuring all engagement is recorded back to contacts and deals, preventing valuable information from being lost in individual inboxes.
What is Clay?
Clay serves as a data-centric prospecting and enrichment tool, commonly utilized alongside other CRMs. It aggregates information from various sources to create precisely targeted lead lists and workflows, although you will typically require a separate CRM to manage ongoing relationships and pipelines.
Feature comparison of Clarify and Clay
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
Clarify seamlessly connects with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, enabling sales teams to automatically capture Gmail, Outlook, calendar, and meeting activities within the CRM. Additionally, it integrates with tools like Zapier, Segment, Posthog, and webhooks to facilitate the transfer of customer and product usage data to and from the database. A forthcoming integration with Loops is designed to send Clarify events to a SaaS-focused email platform without replacing it. Ultimately, Clarify prioritizes consolidating essential inbox and meeting data into one centralized location rather than providing an extensive native marketing ecosystem.
In contrast, Clay relies on manual data entry or enrichment through integrations and does not automatically enhance profiles with social data such as titles, bios, or photos.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
Clarify focuses on the automatic ingestion of email and calendar data, eliminating the need for manual logging. Once connected to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, it seamlessly syncs messages, events, and meeting insights in the background, associating them with the appropriate contacts, companies, and deals. The product highlights features like “auto-capture,” “auto-sync,” and maintaining a continuously updated CRM, but it doesn’t disclose detailed, user-facing sync schedules. As a newer tool, Clarify’s integrations may not be as robust as those of established CRMs, despite its core email and calendar sync being marketed as standard functionality.
In contrast, Clay lacks support for social listening, alerts, or any form of real-time interaction tracking, with its primary strength lying in workflow automation and task management.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Clarify enables sales representatives to send personalized follow-up emails directly from the CRM, utilizing its AI agent to draft messages based on meeting and email contexts. However, external reviews and Clarify's own marketing indicate that the platform currently lacks comprehensive multi-channel sequences and traditional mail merge bulk campaigns. For nurturing streams and onboarding journeys, teams are encouraged to use external tools like Loops or other marketing platforms via integrations. Consequently, Clarify concentrates on enhancing sales communication and maintaining pipeline hygiene, while more advanced CRMs manage extensive campaign tasks.
On the other hand, Clay is not built for social selling; it prioritizes relationship management through CRM-style outreach rather than social messaging or content publishing.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
Clarify enables representatives to send personalized follow-up emails directly from the CRM, often utilizing its AI agent to draft messages based on meeting and email context. However, external reviews and Clarify’s own positioning indicate that the product currently lacks comprehensive multi-channel sequences and traditional mail merge-style bulk campaigns. Consequently, for nurture streams and onboarding journeys, teams must turn to external tools like Loops or other marketing platforms through integrations. This means Clarify remains concentrated on sales communication and maintaining pipeline hygiene, while more established CRMs manage extensive campaign efforts.
Currently, in-browser messaging is not supported in Clay, and users cannot send templated outreach through LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
Clarify positions itself as a leader in CRM email tracking, highlighting tools that monitor opens, clicks, and replies on sales emails. The goal is to capture essential engagement signals from emails sent through connected inboxes or directly from Clarify, then display that activity on timelines and in follow-up recommendations. This enables sales teams to identify who is engaging and determine optimal times for follow-ups, all without transforming Clarify into a comprehensive analytics tool. In comparison to specialized email platforms, the reporting on these events is relatively simple and focused on deal workflows rather than extensive marketing analytics.
While Clay tracks CRM events and internal activities, it lacks the ability to monitor external engagements such as social media interactions or clicks.
folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!
folk CRM is an innovative social selling tool that transforms social interactions into a streamlined, repeatable workflow. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversation context readily accessible, and minimizes manual tasks with automatic enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.
Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk enables teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them within custom pipelines, and track every interaction in one convenient location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication maintains a clean database, and shared notes and tags facilitate easy access to warm introductions and relationship history across the team.
For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and navigate opportunities through the pipeline—all while preserving the human touch that ultimately closes deals.
Conclusion
In summary, Clarify excels in integrating email and calendar data, making it ideal for startups needing streamlined organization, while Clay offers robust data enrichment for targeted prospecting but lacks comprehensive CRM features. However, for teams prioritizing social selling, folk stands out as the best alternative. With its focus on email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk facilitates seamless relationship management, timely follow-ups, and a structured workflow tailored for success in social selling. Don't miss out—try folk CRM for free today!
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